Fundamentals of Risk and Insurance: Insurance Basics

How does Life Insurance work ?

Insurance lives up to expectations by pooling risk. It basically implies that a large group of individuals who need to insure against a significant losses by paying premiums which is known as Insurance pool. Probability of real loss occurrence is very less (single digit percentage) from the group of individuals which makes insuring company profitable. This is the “basic fundamentals of risk and insurance on which insurance companies work”.  For example: many of the individual have accidental life insured but in real there are only few occurrences. Insuring company will pay for your losses as per the cover in the event they occur.

What are the Fundamentals of Risk and Insurance?

Below risk evaulation and process will assist you to understand basics of fundamentals of risk and insurance.

Risk Evaluation Process:

Life is full of unforeseen events where some events are preventable, some events are avoidable and some events are totally unforeseeable. To understand fundamentals of risk and insurance lets take an example of driving a vehicle that can be considered as risk and what you can do to prevent such risk.

Sort of Risks: Bodily injuries, loss or damage of vehicle, fix or repair your vehicle.

The Impact: Spending time in the health care centre, want to rent a bike which no more exists.

The Expenses: Range can go from little to huge

Risk Mitigation: No further driving or hire a person to cover risk by someone else insurance.

We should investigate little deeper into risk management to understand further, Two ways safety can be controlled. You can maintain a strategic distance from the danger inside and out, or you can decide to reduce your risk. You can decide either to transfer risk to an insuring company or you can retain your risk intentionally or automatically with no protection. Apart from this you can also choose to share risk. For example, an organisation shares risk with co-owers when assuming to be risk in another enterprises or corporation.

Along these lines, Let us go back to our example of driving a vehicle, It is always advisable to get protection or get insured for high potential risks. It is protective against any disaster which many lead to you or your family or your love once from any financial crisis. Now a day’s Insurance for vehicle is mandatory purchase for cover against any significant loss to yourself or third party.  At the end of the day, some risks are so expensive or even cannot be valued in case of life in such cases its worth taking insurance policy from insurance company by paying reasonable premium monthly or on yearly basis.

Risk Management Process:

After confirming that you want to protect against any uncertainty, Next step would be to search best insurance cover available in the market it’s generally best to search different options around to get the best deal. Else you can go through insurance specialist’s advice to get the best deal for you but at the same time you should keep in mind that specialist agents work only for the insuring company.

There are two types of specialist Agents:

• Captive Specialist Agents: Captive specialists speak about solitary insuring company and they are obliged to just work with one insuring company at a time.

• Independent Specialist Agent: Independent specialists speak about numerous coverage products from various insuring companies and works only for customers to locate appropriate policy which is suitable to you.

Underwriting Process:

Insuring company undergo “underwriting procedure for evaluating the fundamentals of risk and insurance”. Insurance company decides how likely this uncertainty may occur. This evaluation is done by Insuring Company while deciding premium. Depending upon risk and probability of occurrence, premium amount is been decided. Apart from this underwriting procedure will empower the insurer to figure out whether applicants meet their approval guidelines some of the policies may examine your driving history, health records, insurable interest and so forth.

Insurance Documentation Process Flow:

Insurance contract document is a legal document that spells out the conditions, features, coverage and limitations of an insurance product. It is most important that you read the contract and ask questions if any cover mentioned by specialist agent is not present or any cover points you do not understand. You should prefer not to pay for the insurance upfront or without reading terms and conditions. You should only accept contract after agreeing on all the clauses mentioned by insurer. For more information, read the offer document presented by your Insurer before signing on it.

Some of the Insurance term you should know:

• Bound: Once the insurance product or contract has been accepted it is called “bound”. This process is called the binding process.

• Insurer: A person or company that acknowledge the risk and compensate the losses to the insured in the event of occurrence in return of premium paid (In general term, an insurance company).

• Insured: The organisation or entity or individual protecting or safeguarding risk of loss to a third party through insurance contractual agreement. (In general term, person or entity compensated for loss by an insurer as per terms of contract).

• Insurance Rider:  Additional benefits linked to an insurance policy that modifies the policy’s scope or terms.

• Insurance Umbrella Policy: When coverage contract lacks with scope of cover, an umbrella policy may be obtained to extend the cover losses above the limit of an insurance agreement.

• Insurable Interest: Insurance is not intended to be a profit making community for the beneficiary. Beneficiary must submit the proof of genuine impact in unforeseen loss occurrence. For example, insurable interest for an Individual are considered as their lives, life of their soul mates (spouse). Business partner likewise have an insurable interest on partners, key employees or another organizations, etc.